MarkJames

ahh... I gotcha - I misunderstood what you meant. So in an example scene Switch A is a controller (non load) Switch B is in the scene as responder (load) When you turn A on and off B will turn on and off When you turn B on or off it will have no effect on A In a second example scene Switch A is a controlller (non load) Switch B is a controller (load) A on or off will reflect in B B on or off will reflect in A What you were referring to was the responder link in the controller - not the reciprocal arrangement in a crosslinked 3 or n way relationship. I only point this out because when I first got my ISY I came from a powerhome background where you had to write the responder and controller links manually. The first scene I created in ISY worked in a proper crosslinked manner even though one was a controller and one was a responder - this wasn't because ISY did it - it was because I had left over links from powerhome. It confused the bejesus outta me cuz I thought ISY was creating reciprocal links and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to control things in one direction only. Once I reset the switch and wrote only the ISY links to it it then worked as I would have expected. Took me a week or two of scratching my head to figure that one out and I bet I'm not the only one who's come to ISY with a bunch of already crosslinked switches that wondered why they stopped working when the devices got rewritten by ISY with the actual scenes. It becomes far more apparent with items that can ONLY be controllers or ONLY be responders. mark

I'm not sure that's true. You can make a kpl a controller without it being a responder too (I'm fairly certain). To crosslink you must make them both controllers. I may be wrong so don't throw things at me if I am

I think the part that gets confusing for people starting in ISY - I know it was for me - is the conceptual part of any button only being able to be a controller of one 'scene' though it can be a responder to many. In a typical cross-link between two buttons you just make both controllers - A will turn B on and off, B will turn A on and off. If you make A a controller and B a responder then A will turn B on but B will not turn A on. This is exactly what happens if you manually link two switches too. You must make B a controller of A in order for B and A to 'jive'. In the case of a KPL-6 the primary button is always the Load - so turning it on or off will always turn the load on or off - you can't control the light without controlling the load. You can fool this in a KPL-8, though, by turning the switch upside down - effectively making the load button H instead of button A. This is a useful technique in some situations and you barely notice the little plastic tab on the wrong side. The one button being only one controller gets conceptually difficult when you want to put that button in multiple scenes - but when you think deeper it only makes sense. Turning any one button on will ALWAY turn on everything that is in that scene - so clearly any one button can only be a controller of one 'scene' regardless of how many different things are happening. However any number of things can turn that button on or off so it can be a responder of as many scenes as its link table will allow (over 400, I think) It gets a little more difficult if you have one switch turn on two separate lights that each have their own switches. It's easy to turn them both on by making A a controller of B and C but clearly you don't want B and C to be controllers of A because then if either B OR C turned off A would turn off despite the other being on. In this scenario you have to use a program that monitors a status change to B and C and make A match when B and C match - if B is OFF and C is OFF then turn A off. As for your question, Steve, about sending an insteon command to turn the KPL button on that is, indeed, possible, and is, indeed what ISY does - it just keeps the links in the PLM so that it can keep track readily of what is on and what is off instantaneously. Without this system the ISY would continuously have to poll each device in order to determine if it is on or off - and THAT is a huge amount of unnecessary insteon traffic. Dunno if that helps but there ya go.

In 2.7.10 you can add a device with the same name as an existing device. I did this with a KPL and then subsequently tried to rename the new KPL - but ended up changing names on both kpl-s when answering 'change names on all associate devices' (I assumed this means all the buttons on the same KPL)

Interesting.... I did a hard reset and now I'm trying to restore a select device or two just to see if it does anything. The event viewer shows activity and it looks to the uneducated observer like it always did. A series of INST-ACK then INST-SRX then Standard Direct Ack as it restores the device. Quite a coincidence it died just as I added the remotelinc. Well - if it doesn't work I'll try and get a 2413. I was just logging on here to see if you support that yet. Thanks for your help, mark

Michel, I didn't add an access point or move any. I think I made an error, though, while adding the remotelinc. The ISY software didn't indicate to me how to put the remotelinc into programming mode when adding it nor did the remotelinc manual. So I pressed and held the 1 button to put that into linking mode. The ISY seemed happy to write but it wrote for probably 15 minutes. Not having added a remotelinc before it seemed odd but I left it go. Now there are two KPL's which originally controlled all the different lights in the kitchen and surrounding area that are completely messed up. I've hard reset them and restored them but when I do a compare I find them full of missing records. I restored my backup from a few days ago - prior to the update to 2.7.10 and didn't read your post until after I started a full housewide restore going. As you know, I have a LOT of devices so it's been running for some time and will probably go all night. I've also restored my PLM in an attempt to make everything congruous. At this point I'll phone in to tech support in the morning and see if you can dial in and check this out. I can't even control the KPL from the admin console now. I have buttons that are members of scenes and I can turn the scenes on and off from admin console - the controlled lights go on and off but the buttons on the KPL don't do anything. Wow... this got really whacky. mark

wow! Something REALLY crappy just happened. I just got my first remotelinc and installed it. The installation ran for what seemed like an age. Now that it's done I can no longer control ANY of the lights in the room that the remotelinc was set to control just one of the lights in. I can't even restore it the KPL it should have linked to. I can't tell you if this is 2.7.10 or what as this is my first remotelinc. I'm going to play for a while but I've tried restoring the devices or restoring the links between the light and the controller - neither works. I may have to go back to a backup mark

Sorry.... I don't use an IRlinc so I didn't know. I feed my IR signals directly from an IR panel into the ISY.

I'm not fluent with the IR section yet - it's on my todo list. But all I did was created a folder in the program section called IR commands and then created a series of programs that respond to the button presses. If irbutton_fireplace_on pressed then turn scene fireplace on Like that. It actually happens remarkably quickly. The IR programs work very well. I notice no lag at all. mark

I've only done a bit with my universal remote through ISY but I didn't see any way to add the remote buttons to the Admin console. I found them all available in the programming section, though. It'd be cool if you could access them from admin, mind you. mark

like oberkc said... take a look at your access points too. I have some that have addresses on them and others that do not. I betcha he's right - it's probably an access point ID.

Yeah - I don't know why that happens - I've had it in some of my devices too. I think it's a bad write or something - one of the advanced guys around here will probably know. Are you sure it's not the address of your PLM or a motion sensor? The extra record only matters if you try to communicate with a device of that number. If it does then your system performance will degrade as insteon tries to talk to it but can't find it. Sort of like if you have a bunch of switches in your house and you airgap them to turn them off. Or if you remove devices and don't tell ISY and your PLM. You'll probably never notice this one. I wouldn't worry about it unless you notice odd behavior. mark

I believe the problem with the backup is that it restores your ISY database but I don't think it restores all your devices. Check in your ISY that your device has the proper managed by/manages links, then hard reset the device and restore it. That will clear all the unnecessary links and write all the proper links. You'll probably have to do this with all the devices that have responder or controller links now that shouldn't. The key to understanding it is that ISY keeps a table of what 'should' be there - what it has put there - but you can accidentally or intentionally change that in the devices. You also have to remember that everything insteon does requires both a controller record and a responder record. If you simply delete the controller record but not the responder record then the next time the controller sends a message the responder will still turn on. Conversely if you remove the responder record you can hit the controller all you like but the responder won't do anything. If ISY and the device don't have identical tables (and you can check using diagnostics->device links->compare then you won't get the result you expect. At that point it's easiest to do a 'restore device' mark

Thank you for the fix to my system, Michel. Things are working much more smoothly now. Brilliant bit of troubleshooting - finding that a bad signalinc was the problem - not the ISY. mark

deleted - just read the part you wrote above about mail errors

[deleted]

The links were all created prior to 2.7.9, though they were all rewritten as part of a restore WITH 2.7.9 - so I guess for your purposes the answer would be yes - they were written with 2.7.9 When I switched to 2.7.10 yes - I hard reset and performed a restore I've attached the entire event view of the attempt to restore with 2.7.10 that ends with 'fail to write device link' below. Sorry if there's extra information there - my lunch was burning and when I came back it had already finished so there may be some extra lines.

Something is up with the KPL link writing in this version. I have two KPL's that have not caused me any trouble so far. In this version I get 'failed to write device link' and 'failed to read device link' on them. I just finished removing all the scene memberships from one in the hope that it may be something was corrupt. But now with that one gone it's simply moved the issue to another one. I don't want to keep removing all my links. I've hard reset the KPL's several times and now I've removed one from ISY and am trying to add it back in but the add device routine runs way too long - as if it was having trouble finding the device - then it added a scene by the name that I gave the device and didn't add the device at all. The one that the problem 'moved to' now has 'writing' icons attached but it won't write. I've tried hitting 'write updates' but I get the 'failed to write device link' error which I didn't get yesterday. I've tried a restore on this one but all I get it a bunch of 1011 icons attached and when I try to write the updates I get the 'failed to write' error again. I suppose it could be these KPL's but it seems a bit suspect. mark

I love the little green icons telling me what's writing, what's written, and what's failed to write! I would, however, prefer the icons to be different colors rather than the numbers that are in the boxes - I can't read them very well. mark

How does ISY handle a scenario like this. Scenes have been created within ISY one of the devices in the scene is hard reset you then try to remove the device from the scene from ISY What I'm after is ISY will obviously have to delete the controller/responder records from the device and from the PLM when you try to remove the device from the scene - but what does it do if the record isn't there? Does it error out or does it carry on? Mark

Well, Michel, I've tried a couple of other KPLs and honestly I get a bit of a mixed bag of responses. The other ones all seem to do better than the one I posted about but I still get record mismatches. I've been hard-resetting the devices (all kpl's) and then restoring from ISY 2.7.10 followed immediately by a read device links and compare. I don't get a perfect correlation with any of them. Don't get me wrong - for the most part they write pretty well and the record mismatches don't seem to cause any particular problem (that I can see yet) I just find it odd that from a blank slate the restore shouldn't give me a perfect write and then read back. AFAIK the insteon device should ACK or NAK the write based on a checksum, no? Could it be there's a write retry limit that's too low and ISY is giving up before getting a proper write? I'm thinking I have to learn the ISY gibberish and follow it all in the event window. I don't think it's a signal issue as my install now has 3 hardwired signalincs, 2 plug-in signalincs, and 8 access points. mark

If you remove it in ISY then ISY will remove it from the device. If it's not in ISY but in the device then hard reset the device (power off 10 seconds, press in for 3) then do a restore to the device from ISY. The restore will write all the links that ISY has in its database to the device. If there are others there too the ISY will not remove them - that's why the reset first mark

If you want to do something simple you could use the trial version of powerhome. Download and install it then simply add the one device you're curious about into the database. Reinitialize it and then go to the insteon explorer window. It will show you all the links in it. You will have to do your own interpreting what the links are to by the insteon device addresses but that shouldn't be too hard. You'll also want to clear and restore your PLM afterwards as powerhome will make a PLM entry for the device when you add it. mark

Well, I'm sorry to say Michel that all is not flawless. I've installed 2.7.10 hard reset the kpl in question - 2486 v5.1 reconfigured it to 6 button operation restored it from ISY ran diagnostics->read device links->compare there are 2 record mismatches and 3 'missing this record' in the kpl It's better than 2.7.9a was but it's not all the way there yet. Any info I can send to help troubleshoot? mark

And using tools -> diagnostics -> read device links on the devices that are turning on/off that shouldn't and then using the compare feature to compare what's there to the ISY record is also helpful. I've found many links that I'd created manually or with other s/w that were still present when I switched to ISY. Once you know if there are some 'extra' links in the device you can hard reset it and then restore it from ISY. mark